Widow’s Bay cinematographer Christian Sprenger talks to The Contending about his Emmy-nominated episode “Our History.”
Do you remember the first marketing you saw from Widow’s Bay?
It might have been that teaser, later featured in the second episode, where the man asks visitors to come with him in a long take.
“I remember we filmed that in pre-production during a prep day,” said cinematographer Christian Sprenger. “We went to the beach and shot for like half an hour, and we all laughed so hard when we were filming it because it was such a funny, weird way to kick off making the show. But also when we called cut, I remember [director] Hiro [Murai] and I turned to each other, and I was like, ‘That’s probably the trailer for the show,’ and then we laughed, and it ended up being the first thing that was released for this.”
‘That’s Probably the Trailer for the Show!’
It’s the perfect way to acclimate audiences to the series. Part creepy, part hilarious, it sets a tone. Like so many of the residents of our favorite New England island, Sprenger and director Hiro Murai go way back, all the way back to their Emmy-winning work for FX’s Atlanta (Teddy Perkins!).
“I think a lot of times, Hiro has a much slower [pace]. He references like Ozu [Japanese filmmaker] a lot. It’s very meditative and dreamy, and I think because of that, we’ve adopted this approach where, in terms of camera work, we really try to block scenes and cover scenes with one-camera coverage or one camera at a time, whereas a lot of traditional television shows will sometimes run two or three cameras at once because you’re serving this very demanding schedule and you also have to like protect yourself. So when you go in the edit, you have lots of options, and we really try to strive towards a very consistent and clean intentional vision.”
Widow’s Bay Episode 6 “Our History”
To match Katie Dippold’s intentional vision for Widow’s Bay Episode 6’s “Our History,” for which Sprenger is nominated, he had discussions with the showrunner about balancing horror, history, and comedy in one episode.
“Something like this can so easily alienate its audience if it gets too jokey or too goofy,” said Sprenger, “and so we really tried to let the jokes and the comedy beats sit underneath the very grounded, very realistic performances. Again, so much of that is credited to our director for the episode, Ti [West], and also our actors. Betty Gilpin completely understood the assignment that we were not trying to make a comedy first or even really a horror first. We were trying to make something genuinely dramatic with genuine performances. As a technician, she’s just an incredible actor, able to deliver multiple options at different levels of a read for how a joke works.”
Sprenger’s nominated episode relies a lot on natural light since it takes place in the 1700s. But it also features a tunnel sequence, with Betty Gilpin escaping her house underground.
“Our incredible production designer built the tunnel on stage. It was largely built out of foam, and we literally carved the passageway out of these giant blocks of foam. We would go in there with our camera operator while they were building it to make sure there was just enough room to sneak through the tunnel. Ti designed the coverage so that we could film from different angles of this one piece of the set that looked like it was endless caverns. We were sort of like, ‘What if it turned there and then that’s where the staircase was?’ It was a fun process of discovery.”
Is Widow’s Bay Horror or Comedy?
Another process of discovery for Sprenger and the filmmakers was how scary the Apple TV show is. Like so many fans, they also debated the horror-versus-comedy elements of the series as they were filming.
“When we were making it, we didn’t expect that it was going to be that scary. The clown in the basement, which a lot of people have called out as one of the scarier scenes. When we shot that, we thought it was hilarious. It looked so goofy and weird, the way he was running, and we all laughed so hard. But it is also genuinely thrilling. The sequence with the sea hag and the lazy boy chair was borderline slapstick, and then we were like, okay, we don’t want it to be slapstick, so let’s pull that back. Then in the music and the sound design and the pacing of the edit, that’s where a lot of the horror and the mystery and the drama started to build, but while we were making it, we were constantly having conversations about, is this joke landing too hard? Are people gonna understand this joke? You don’t do that when you’re making a comedy and you probably don’t do that very often when you’re making a horror show. So I do think that Katie’s senses are very much kind of in the horror comedy genre.”
All episodes of Widow’s Bay are streaming on Apple TV.
